The good news is that today's workplace is filled with men and women who would have been past the age of retirement in previous generations. The bad news is that the erosion of physical skills that comes with aging makes these men and women especially vulnerable to injury and illness. As the safety director, it falls on you to provide the additional protection older workers need. Last week, we discussed how to help aging workers retain their balance and agility. Now let's look at what you can do to help them retain energy, focus and strength.

The Loss of Energy

Working safely requires physical and mental energy. It's when fatigue sets in that workers forget their training, resort to dangerous shortcuts and lower their guards. For example, reduced energy levels contribute to slips and falls because fatigued workers don't see hazards or lift their feet high enough to clear small obstacles.

Robert Pater, managing director of Strategic Safety Associates/MoveSMART in Portland, OR, says there are several contributors to reduced energy levels and reserves in older people. They include:

The Retaining of Energy

Aging workers can boost their energy levels and reserves by:

The Loss of Focus

"Focus," according to Pater, "refers to the abilities to select where you wish to direct your attention, internally or externally, sustain your attention on a desired task, switch your attention to another need and recall needed information, procedures or training."

Being unfocused contributes to several kinds of injury-causing incidents, including strains/sprains, slips, trips and falls, struck by/against, and motor vehicle collisions.

Brain chemical changes affect older workers' ability to recall information or to quickly switch attention, both of which are important to multitasking. Stress can impair memory and ability to control attention, as can age-related sleep problems.

The Retaining of Focus

Some focus-enhancing suggestions for your older workers include:

Staying Strong, Regardless of Your Age

Age-related muscle loss relates to loss of strength, which in turn increases an older worker's risk for strains, sprains, trips and falls.

Some of Pater's solutions for enhancing strength include:

Conclusion

"Aging workers have significant advantages and challenges," says Pater. "By recognizing their strengths and practicing best interventions and skills for overcoming their challenges, it is possible to significantly enhance the safety, health and productivity of older workers."

THIS DAY IN HISTORY


May 29, 1914

The Empress of Ireland Disaster

By Ted Morrison

The sinking of RMS Empress of Ireland on this date in 1914 was the world's second-worst peacetime marine disaster, a dubious distinction held until 1987. More passengers died aboard the Empress than aboard RMS Titanic (but the Titanic lost a much larger crew complement).

Legend says that the ship's cat, an orange tabby named Emmy, had never missed a voyage in two years. But on the evening of May 28, 1914, Emmy bolted for shore. Witnesses say that she sat atop a dockside shed watching as the ship sailed silently away. Just a couple of days later, that same shed would be used as a makeshift morgue.

At 2 a.m. on May 29, the Empress was heading for open water down the St. Lawrence River near the Quebec town of Rimouski. Captain George Kendall spotted the lights of another ship, SS Storstad, a Norwegian coal vessel up ahead. But Kendall then lost the ship in an enormous fog bank. So he ordered Empress to cut engines just outside the fog and sounded the ship's horn to warn the Storstad of her presence. The Empress held position for about 8 minutes when she was struck amidships by the Storstad which, though damaged, did not sink.

The force of the impact wasn't enough to wake most of the passengers aboard Empress. But the Empress had been fatally wounded. She began shipping water at an estimated 60,000 gallons (226,800 litres) per second through a hole 14 feet (4.5 meters) wide and 25 high (8 meters). Just 14 minutes after the collision, she rolled over and sank.

She was carrying 1,477 passengers and crewmembers. The tragedy struck so quickly that there was no chance to evacuate. Of those who made it off the ship into the water, or clung to the side of the hull as the deck turned vertical, most died in the near-freezing water or, lacking lifejackets, drowned before rescue ships arrived. The Storstad, disabled by the collision, had drifted too far away to help.

Only 465 people survived the sinking of Empress. Of 138 children there were only four survivors.

The actual events causing the collision are a matter of historical dispute. Inquiries convened by the British and Norwegian authorities each vindicated the "home team" crew for the crash and blamed it on the other.

The disaster stands as a testament to the fact that the best safety planning may sometimes be overwhelmed by events. The Empress was equipped with only eight tiny wooden lifeboats when she was built in 1905. Following new regulations enacted after the Titanic disaster, she was refitted with enough boats to rescue everyone on board. But the list to starboard following the crash made the port boats unusable, and only four of the remaining ones were launched.

Fire and evacuation drills were also required by the new safety laws, but with the ship lurching onto its side in only minutes, there was no time to carry them out properly; nor even to rouse sleeping passengers, let alone distribute the 1500 life jackets aboard.

The Empress had 11 watertight compartments, another legacy of Titanic, closed by sealed doors below the waterline. She could float safely with any two compartments flooded. But the doors had to be closed by hand, and no seamen were standing watch over them. Furthermore, the midships doors were so damaged by the collision that they were un-closeable.

One change came about as a result of the disaster. Following the tragedy, shipbuilders began engineering the bows of ships differently. The traditional backward-slanting bows of ships of the time caused massive underwater damage to other vessels in a collision. The effect of the Storstad's bow, sloping backward and reinforced for cutting through ice, on the Empress has been compared to "a chisel forced into an aluminum can." In recognition of the dangers of backward sloping bows, builders began to adopt the forward-leaning bow.

Interesting fact: When the ships collided, fireman William Clarke, working aboard the Empress, felt the lurch and sprang up a ladder from the engine room to the deck, where he helped in lowering one of the lifeboats that were deployed. Clarke had reason to react as he did. Two years previously he had survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

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